Stray Cat
by TajiYami
Summary: after nearly 40 years the Zodiac was reborn and starting to draw together AUT


I do not own Fruits Baskets, or any one of the original characters, but I do own Kiichi Sohma. This story takes place some time after the books, during the next generation of Zodiacs. Enjoy

Stray Cat

I'm not quite sure when my life got bad. For as long as I can remember anyways, things never seemed to go well for me. In fact, if anything I think they just started bad and got worse as I got older. Everyone I have ever been close to, and there have not been many, abandoned me long ago. I don't have a family, or friends, and half the time, I don't even have a place to call home.

My name is Kiichi Sohma, and I am from Osaka. I am supposed to be a member of a very large family in Kaibara, but I've never met one of them. Even if I were to meet them though, I doubt they would accept me, hell, even my own parents refused to accept me. No one could care for a monster like me anyways. My father used to beat that into me, especially after mother killed herself. He said she couldn't bare looking at me, and that my very existence was killing her like a cancer. She died, and shortly afterwards, I was taken away from my father.

For a while I lived with a foster mother, and two girls who were about my age, as well as another boy who was two years older than me. For a while, I thought things were going to change, and that maybe I would have a good place there. This is what I thought, until I was six years old, and one of the girls hugged me. When she hugged me, there had been a loud explosion, and rather than coming out as myself, I had been transformed into the form of a grey cat. She freaked out, and ended up kicking me and running off. Maybe it was because we were so young still, or maybe it was because it was too hard to believe. She told everyone in the house that I had turned into a cat, though by the time everyone came to see, I had already turned back to myself. She was told that she was imagining things by our foster mother and scolded for telling such lies. However, she refused to tolerate my presence, and I ran away.

Days past after I ran away. It had been winter time, and snow was on the ground. I remember those few days only as a blur. As the time past, I got sicker and sicker, until I finally passed out. Amazingly, I did not die. Instead, someone had found me and brought me to the hospital to recover. They said I was unconscious for several days before I woke up, and they were amazed that I had.

After that incident, my foster mother refused to take me back, and I had to move to a new home. This time, I was sent to a little place in Kyoto. It wasn't much like the other foster home I had lived in. There were fifteen other boys there, and no girls, and it doubled as a boarding school. All my life, I have been frail and weak, plagued by frequent illness. The older boys saw this immediately, and I became a target of their twisted pranks and jokes. For more than a year, not a day went by that I was not hurt, humiliated, or tortured in some creatively cruel manner by the other boys, and I was unable to fight back.

As the abuse continued and escalated, some part of me snapped deep inside. I don't know when, or remember what happened to cause it, but a fire started in my heart and since then has only gotten stronger and more powerful. I learned how to hate. One of the older boys named Takeshi, who was 12 at the time, started in on me one day. The fight was started by him and his group. I had been having a particularly bad day, because I was sick and had not been sleeping well. Takeshi shoved me, then spun me around to face him. His fist connected with my face, and the other guys around laughed, but stopped when I didn't go down. Rather, I took the punch without hardly a flinch, and stood my ground. I told him he was being a stupid arrogant ass-hole, and he tried to hit me again, but this time I dodged, and kicked him, nailing him in his ugly face and knocking him to the ground instead. I dropped my arms into a martial arts stance, and stood my ground. After taking Takeshi down, his friends all ganged up on me, and though I ended up getting pretty badly hurt, I fought back. That was the first time I had ever fought back against someone, and since then, I refuse to let anyone have complete dominance over me like they did.

Time passed, and as I got older and stronger, the abuse lessened. I started learning martial arts and self defense, and taught myself how to protect myself in a fight. At the age of 13, I was still one of the smaller, frailer boys, but it was well known amongst the others that I wouldn't just lay back and let them torment me. That was the age the rest of my life fell apart, just when things seemed to be looking up for me. Shortly after my thirteenth birthday, the foster home I was living in was going to be shut down, and I was going to be moving back in with my father. Before I was placed in foster care, my father had been placed in a hospital to try and fix his mental instabilities. As much as I protested against going back, I was stuck, and forced to move back to Osaka.

The first couple of months back in my father's house were strange. There were people constantly coming over to check up on him, and he hardly spoke to me or even acknowledged my presence. Shortly after moving in, I was enrolled in the local public school, and I used that as my way out of the house. I left early in the morning before he woke up, and stayed out until well after dark when I could. That was until that one day.

It had been raining all day, which always made me feel incredibly weak and sick, and because I was not feeling well, I went home straight from school. I got home, and the first thing I noticed was that the whole house was eerily silent. I had thought no one was home, so I wandered into the main room of the house. I stopped in the door way, finding my father sitting in the middle of the floor, a couple empty bottles of liquor laying on the ground near him. "Father?" I had asked quietly, stepping into the room. With a speed and intensity I never would have expected from the man, he was on me, like an animal or man possessed. I remember letting out a cry of pain and surprise when his fist connected with my stomach, and he sent me to my knees, hardly able to breathe. "You monster!" he yelled at me, and hit me again, this time in the face, "How dare you show your face here again!" The scent of alcohol was thick around him. "I should have killed you when you killed your mother," he spat out the hateful words and grabbed my hair, pulling my head up so I was forced to look into his eyes. "Get off me!" I yelled back and tried to push him away, "I'm not a monster!" What was to happen next was what truly sent me over the edge into the abyss I created for myself out of ignorance and denial. "You think you aren't a monster?" my father asked

Before I had time to react, my father grabbed my wrist harshly and held it up for me to see the black and white rosary I wore faithfully since I could remember. His fingers laced around the beads and slipped them effortlessly from me. I remember feeling cold all over at the loss of the beads, and sick. "No," I choked out involuntarily as he stepped back and threw the beads into a corner of the room. The pain was intense, starting within seconds of losing the beads, and it felt as though my whole body was trying to rip out of itself. I heard myself scream, but my voice was so far away, and it felt like I was falling away from myself. The pain lasted for only a few moments, but it felt like an eternity, everything else became a blur, and I felt as though I were half blinded, blinded by the rage and hate that seemed to be entwining itself through my whole existence. I lashed out, hardly in control of my actions. I was only half aware of everything around me, and the crashing and splintering of furniture and wood. At one point, I remember striking and impaling something soft and wet with my claws, but I threw it to the side.

Most of the room was trashed, and I stopped, letting out a low growl. It was then that I noticed my hands, and what was left of me under the monster's mind sparked. My hands were large, with sickle claws, which were covered in blood. My breath caught in my throat and I looked around the room, noticing my father laying in a heap on the ground near the closet. Blood was pooling around his dead form, soaking the floor. I moved over close to him, noticed he was dead, and then I noticed my reflection in the mirror in the closet. I tried to scream, but the only sound that came was a hoarse growl, and I stepped back, tripping over something laying on the ground, and landing hard on my back. the reflection was not of me, but of a horrible demonic thing that didn't even resemble me. I was a monster. I turned my claws on myself, desperately searching for myself within the monstrous form I was in . The claws cut deep into me, and I hardly felt them, and continued until I was soaked with my own blood and the world was darkening around me. That was when I changed back to myself.

Most of the events following my father's death are a blur in my memories. I was admitted to the hospital with multiple lacerations from an unknown source, and they said I was lucky to be alive. I don't think so. I'm not even human, and I killed someone, possibly two someone's, my parents. While I was in the hospital, they said I suffered from hallucinations, nightmares, and strange mental lapses which almost sent me into a comatose state. These symptoms excelled to the point that I was placed in a mental ward for a couple of years, in which time the symptoms became gradually more stable.

When it finally came to the point that they thought I might have been alright in the outside world, they looked up my family. I was released to go to Kaibara, and was to be placed in the care and guardianship of one Dr. Sohma. At the time, it sounded like another place to be shipped to, and hurt again. Just the same, I departed by train and arrived without incident. After getting the directions to the main Sohma Estate, I started walking. . .

Maybe things will be different this time. . . .


End file.
